Christianity in Ancient Jewish Tradition: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Cambridge, 4 February 1999

by William Horbury

Christianity in Ancient Jewish Tradition, the topic of this short work, has played a large part in the approach of non-Jews to post-Biblical Jewish literature as a whole. Here special attention is paid to the formative thirteenth-century phase in the study of this topic, in Cambridge and throughout western Europe, with reference to rediscovered Greek and Hebrew sources for ancient Judaism and in a setting of mission and Jewish-Christian disputation. It is argued that study of explicit references to Christianity in Jewish tradition should be held together, as in the thirteenth century, with consideration of the question whether Christianity is somehow implicit in the Jewish tradition from which it derives. A survey of aspects of medieval and modern enquiry leads to suggestions for an approach to the topic today.

32 pages, Paperback

First published December 4, 2000